Duma Key

Content Warning: This section of the guide deals with material that describes psychological terror, themes of loss, violence and sexual assault against children, and death by suicide.

Edgar will always love the little girl version of Elizabeth he imagines, despite everything she has cost him. He asks the reader to imagine her as a two-year-old, almost 90 years ago: She falls from a pony-carriage and hits her head on a stone. She loses her memory completely. Then one day, she does something courageous: She tries to bring her world back into being by drawing it. She sketches the line of the horizon with her pencil.

Edgar introduces himself as a “genuine American-boy success” (2). Edgar left his construction company job to start his own business, The Freemantle Company, in Minnesota. By the time he was 50, he and his wife, Pam, had 40 million dollars. With his two daughters Melinda and Ilse grown up, Edgar thought his future was made. Fate intervened. At a jobsite, a 12-story crane rammed into Edgar’s pick-up truck, cracking his skull. Edgar lost most of the vision in his right eye, his right hip had to be replaced, and his right arm amputated. The silver lining was that his right arm is not his dominant arm—he is left-handed.